Vanity Fair: “I feel like I’m stuck inside a saloon in a Western, and outside there’s two groups with guns,” says Sarah May Guenther, a camera operator who has worked on films and TV shows like Joker, Maestro, and The Gilded Age. The gunslingers she’s imagining—and you can decide for yourself who’s wearing the black hats and who’s wearing the white ones—are the studios and the 75,000 or so writers and actors on strike.
3 comments:
The entertainment industry is definitely at an inflection point currently, with the massive consolidated WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike still dragging on and the possibility of an IATSE strike next year. Not to mention the narrowly avoided IATSE strike regarding the pink contract earlier this year, consolidarity between the unions is so important right now, we can’t have division in the industry because without support, no individual striking union will achieve anything. I do hope that if a strike authorization is called for IATSE that SAG-AFTRA and WGA will also continue picketing in solidarity, especially because the proliferation of streaming has made most everybody but the studios broke. It especially scares me, because we are currently training to work in an industry that is currently super unstable. That makes me worry about whether I'm going to be able to pay for medication or pay off debt if the situation does not get better.
I do think that everyone, especially union members, understands the gravity of the situation that is happening in Hollywood. When strikes start, there is the unspoken agreement that adjacent unions will help if there is a need. I don't really love the wording of this article, because everybody knew what they were signing up for when the WGA/SAG strikes started, and it shouldn't really be looked at repayment of a debt when unions are always helpful to other unions. Of course no one wants to strike, especially the workers who know they are going to be out of work for the duration of the strike. I do think the unions who have joined in with the current strike out of solidarity are expecting a similar response, but I do not think that they have to worry. I think WGA and SAG both understand the situation they are in, and while they did start the strike, they didn't start the working conditions they are fighting to change. This strike will help everyone, and I hope it does not come to the point where unions start getting pitted against other unions just because they are fighting for livable working conditions.
The solidarity between unions supporting the WGA and SAG strikes so far has been really admirable, and I haven’t really thought about or considered the fact that it is not a requirement for those unions to turn around and support unions like IATSE and Teamsters on their own contract negotiations. I mean, it would really suck if they didn’t and it wouldn’t be very cool of them, especially if the mindset behind not supporting the other unions is just that they want to get back to work when a lot of members of those other unions haven’t been able to really work or have struggled to find work because of their strike. The entire concept of the flattening industry and decreasing differences between above-the-line and below-the-line members of the film industry is fascinating. It will definitely be interesting to see what happens when IATSE and Teamsters start negotiating contracts, especially depending on the state of the writers/actors strike at that time.
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